Work from the Collection

Le concept de Cordélia

Date: 2010
Medium: Installation
Materials: Walnut, Bronze, Glass, Oak, Wax, Terracotta, Super 8 film, TV set, Television, Screen
Dimensions: Variable dimensions
Collection: Lafayette anticipations - Fonds de dotation Famille Moulin
Le concept de Cordélia is an installation combining sculpture, hybrid furniture borrowed from the kouros, and two monitors broadcasting a video loop seen from the point of view of each protagonist. A reworked extract from L’Île de la Répétition (2010), these dreamlike images shot on Super 8 film present an allegorical dialogue between the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard and a young girl named Cordelia in a contemporary living space. The conversation focuses on the feminine ideal embodied by Cordelia, as laid out by the thinker in the fictional Seducer’s Diary inserted in a theoretical treatise. She becomes aware of her virtual condition and, feeling trapped, complains to her creator. The mysterious ancient profile on a pedestal reflects the psychic intimacy of the two characters by appearing in both real and diegetic space. By highlighting sculpture’s potential to represent duality, Benoît Maire explores the limits of the materialization of the concept through its disruptive dimension, between field and counter-field, conscious and unconscious, reason and affect.

Text written by Veronica Doszla as part of the partnership between the École du Louvre and Lafayette Anticipations – Fonds de dotation Famille Moulin.

Exhibition

Antidote 6
La Galerie des Galeries, Paris (France)
from 14 Oct 2010 to 08 Jan 2011